Mega MBP Problems

A MBP that will not get past the GREY SCREEN OF MISERY.
Safe Mode will not work.
Single User Mode will not work
Booting off the CD using a held down C does not work
The CD I put in was actually a Mac Pro boot disc*, which is all I had to hand.
The aforemented CD will not eject.

I am ballsed if I know how to get around this one.

Please help!

*I should note here that there are no Firewire cables anywhere in the building, so Target Disc Mode is out of the question too.

This happened to me, except with a blank CD instead of a Install Disk. Do you have a mouse? If you do, click on hold the mouse when you boot up the computer, and the disk should pop right out. After that, your MBP will work fine, unless something else is wrong.

Do you have external firewire and USB peripherals connected? Remove them (except for key board and mouse of course) and reboot holding down the Option key.

There's no guarantee that it'll help, but it does sometimes.

This happened to me when I installed 10.4.9. I thought I'd borked my iMac (first time anything had every gone wrong on a software update) but remembered what I'd read about removing peripherals so didn't panic too much.

Well, I went and spent £18 on a firewire cable, and was able to connect it to a g4 powermac. Only after I connected a apple keyboard to the laptop was I able to achieve anything, it appears, for some unknown reason to me, that when the boot dvd is in the drive, the keyboard is useless. In target disk mode only the dvd drive mounted properly, which enabled me to eject the dvd but not fix the hard disk.

I restarted in Single User mode and received a quagmire of errors, and was not able to run fsck successfully.

This morning I put in my MBP install disc, and once again it will not boot. I am unable to get to a suitable keyboard again for atleast a few hours, so I am back to square one.

I've got an awful lot of data I need on this harddrive. I am starting to panic.

This is bad... I'd written most of a 2,000 word essay and had the indesign files for a 24 page booklet on there. I've a PDF of the latter, that will have to do, as there's no way I'm going to get it back before the deadline.

This is bad... I'd written most of a 2,000 word essay and had the indesign files for a 24 page booklet on there. I've a PDF of the latter, that will have to do, as there's no way I'm going to get it back before the deadline.

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